In the previous post, So what about that second vote? I tried to explain how the modified D’Hondt system was used to provide a proportional representation from the Scottish regions to the Scottish Parliament.

That post was written because people on Twitter were talking about how best to use their second vote. None of them provided any evidence for the convictions, and it became clear that they didn’t understand the system. That was fair enough because neither did I, and nor did anyone I asked. So the question about how best to use the second vote seemed, to me at least, to somewhat depend on an understanding of how the system worked.

In this post I want to look at what would have happened if all the people who voted SNP in the North East region in 2007 had voted Green. Would that have changed things? And, if the result was different, what would the difference look like, and mean.

Might be best to quickly look at what the result actually was

North East Scotland 2007

It all starts with the constituency vote. Not the tally of votes per party in the constituencies; that’s not important here. What matters is the number of seats that the parties gained in the constituency vote

Labour: 1 seat

Liberal Democrats: 2 seats

SNP: 6 seats

The regional vote in NE Scotland in 2007 looked like this

And this resulted in

Conservatives: 2 seats

Labour: 2 seats

Liberal Democrats: 1 seat

SNP: 2 seats

And putting this with the constituency seats

Labour: 1 seat

Liberal Democrats: 2 seats

SNP: 6 seats

Conservatives: 2

Green: 0

Labour: 3

Liberal Democrat: 3

SNP: 8

SSP: 0

And that’s what happened. Sixteen candidates were elected. 50% of these were from an independence supporting party (the SNP) with the other 50% split between the Better Together supporting parties.

Looking at the this from an independence/unionist point of view I wondered what would have happened if every single one of those SNP voters had voted for another independence supporting party? What would have happened if every single one of those SNP voters had, for example, voted Green?

In NE Scotland in 2007, the SNP gained six constituency seats and received 105,265 regional votes whereas the Greens gained no constituency seats and received 8,148 in the regional list vote. So what I’ve done is take all those SNP votes and added them to the Green tally which gives the Greens an imagined tally of 113,413. I’m not going to explain how this all works again (it’s on the previous post), but here’s a summary

Round 1

Conservative: 37,666

Greens: 113,413

Labour: 26,063

Liberal Democrat: 13,645

SNP: 0

SSP: 1,051

Result: the Greens win their first regional seat

Round 2

Conservative: 37,666

Greens: 56,707

Labour: 26,063

Liberal Democrat: 13,645

SNP: 0

SSP: 1,051

Result: the Greens win their second regional seat

Round 3

Conservative: 37,666

Greens: 37,804

Labour: 26,063

Liberal Democrat: 13,645

SNP: 0

SSP: 1,051

Result: the Greens win their third regional seat

Round 4

Conservative: 37,666

Greens: 28,353

Labour: 26,063

Liberal Democrat: 13,645

SNP: 0

SSP: 1,051

Result: the Tories win their first regional seat

Round 5

Conservative: 18,833

Greens: 28,353

Labour: 26,063

Liberal Democrat: 13,645

SNP: 0

SSP: 1,051

Result: the Greens win their fourth regional seat

Round 6

Conservative: 18,833

Greens: 22,683

Labour: 26,063

Liberal Democrat: 13,645

SNP: 0

SSP: 1,051

Result: Labour win their first regional seat

Round 7

Conservative: 18,833

Greens: 22,683

Labour: 13,031

Liberal Democrat: 13,645

SNP: 0

SSP: 1,051

Result: the Greens win their fifth regional seat

So, in this imaginary scenario the regional result would be:-

Conservatives: 1 (-1)

Green: 5 (+5)

Labour: 1 (-2)

Liberal Democrat: 0 (-1)

SNP: 0 (-6)

which possibly, just by looking at the figures, won’t cut much mustard with SNP people. However, looking at it from a independence/unionist perspective the result would be:-

pro-independence party representatives: 11 (+3)

unionist party representatives: 5 (-3)

So by not voting SNP in the regional vote in North East Scotland in 2007, SNP voters could have elected more pro-independence representatives than they did by voting SNP.

The next post will consider what would have happened if the SNP regional vote had been equally split between the Greens and the SSP

This all started on Twitter. Some people were talking about how best to use their second vote in the forthcoming Scottish parliamentary elections and since I didn’t actually understand how the voting system worked I just lurked until it dawned on me that they didn’t know how the system worked either. I asked a couple of people offline. They didn’t know either. So this post is my attempt to explain how the Scottish electoral system works. In a subsequent post I’ll attempt to understand what this example tells us about the second vote.

The Scottish Electoral Systems

There are two different electoral systems used to elect representatives to the Scottish Parliament.

It all begins with the constituency votes. There are seventy-three constituencies in the Scottish elections (different from the Westminster boundaries) and each of these constituencies elects a single representative based on a first-past-the-post system (FPTP). The FPTP system is just one of several of what are known as ‘plurality systems’.

The electoral system used for the regional ballot for the Scottish Parliament is called the Additional Member System. This is a variant of the D’Hondt system with the the number of seats won in the local constituency FPTP vote taken into account in the calculation. So although the number of votes for each constituency candidate has no bearing on how regional members are elected, the number of constituency seats that each party gains in a region plays an important part.

Before going any further, this BBC video gives a good explanation of the standard D’Hondt system.

Right, back to Scotland, where it’s done a little bit differently.

There are currently eight regions in Scotland. These are :-

Central Scotland

Glasgow

Highlands and Islands

Lothians

Mid Scotland and Fife

North East Scotland

South Scotland

West Scotland

Each of these eight regions provides seven regional, or list, MSPs (a total of 56 if you didn’t do the arithmetic) which when added to the 73 constituency MSPs gives us a grand total of 129.

North East Scotland, 2007

So since Pol asked.

In the 2007 North East Scotland region, the constituency results were:-

Labour – 1 seat

Liberal Democrats – 2 seats

SNP – 6 seats

It’s only when we know the constituency results that we can start to calculate the regional results.

The number of votes cast on the regional list in North East Scotland in the 2007 election were:-

SNP 105,265

Labour 52,125

Conservative 37,666

Liberal Democrat 40,934

Scottish Green 8,148

SSP 1,331

Solidarity 2,004

Scottish Senior Citizens 3,874

BNP 2,764

Scottish Christian 1,895

UKIP 1,045

Christian Peoples 941

Scottish Voice 569

Scottish Enterprise 569

For the sake of simplicity I’m going to disregard any party below 4,000 votes. This makes no difference to the calculation or the overall result. In the spreadsheet I’ve included the Greens, the SSP and Solidarity because I want to do some analysis in a later post.
So for now we’re only dealing with:-

SNP 105,265

Labour 52,125

Liberal Democrat 40,934

Conservative 37,666

Scottish Green 8,148

Getting Started with D’Hondt

Round 1

Before we can actually say who has won Round 1 we need to apply the standard D’Hondt formulation to the regional votes of the parties that won constituency seats. The standard D’Hondt formula is

q = V / (s+1)

where

the quotient q is the number of votes to be accounted for in the first round of AMS;

V is the number of regional votes for the respective party;

s is for the total number of seats; and

(s+1) which is known as the ‘divisor’

So because the SNP did particularly well in gaining 6 constituency seats their regional vote tally is reduced by the divisor (6+1) to 15,038, and the same is then done for the Liberal Democrats (2 seats) and Labour (1 seat) because they were the only other parties that won constituency seats.

And, hopefully the chart shows the formula has used the constituency seats to provide a more regional average.
Technically, the formula is applied to the vote share of every other party on the regional list even if they didn’t win a constituency seat. The Greens can be used as an example

q = V / (s+1)
q = 8148 / (0+1)
q = 8,148

And it’s because they didn’t win any constituency seats that they have 0 entered into the formula. This means that unlike the parties that won constituency seats the Greens enter the first round of the regional vote with all their regional votes. And that’s the same for the Tories and every other party on the list that didn’t win a constituency seat.

So here we go.
In the first round the North East Scotland regional tallies were:-

Result: Labour again have the highest share, and so win their second regional seat, and increase their overall number of seats to 3.

Round 5

Hopefully you’re starting to see the pattern here.
Once again, before we can see who has won Round 5 we need to apply the D’Hondt formula to the winner of Round 4 which was the Labour.
So going into Round 5, the Labour tally is reduced using the formula to 13,031

q = 52,125 / (3+1)
q = 13,031

The tallies of the unsuccessful parties in the previous round are unchanged for this round.

So, here we go again.
In the fifth round the tallies in the North East Scotland region were:-

Result: the SNP have the highest share, and so win their first regional seat, and increase their overall number of seats to 7.

Round 6

Once again, the D’Hondt formula is applied to the winner of the previous round which was the SNP. So going into Round 6 the SNP tally is reduced, using the formula, to 13,158
q = 105,265 / (7+1)
q = 13,158

The tallies of the unsuccessful parties in the previous round are again unchanged for this round.

So, here we go again.
In the sixth round the tallies in the North East Scotland region were:-

Result: the Lib Dems have the highest share, and so win their first regional seat, and increase their overall number of seats to 3.

Round 7

For the last time, the D’Hondt formula is applied to the winner of Round 6 which was the Lib Dem, and their tally is reduced, using the formula, to 10,234

q = 40,934 / (3+1)

q = 10,234

The tallies of the unsuccessful parties in the previous round are, you guessed it, unchanged for this round.

So, here we go again for the last time
In the seventh and final round, the votes in the North East Scotland region were:-SNP 13,158
Labour 13,031
Conservative 12,555
Liberal Democrat 10,234
Scottish Green 8,148

Result: the SNP again have the highest share and win their second regional seat. They now increase their overall number of seats to 8

North East Scotland region summary

SNP – 2 seats

Labour – 2 seats

Conservative – 2 seats

Liberal Democrat – 1 seat

Scottish Green – 0 seats

And that’s how it works. Once the total number of regional votes are collated, the parties that won constituency seats have their regional vote tally reduced using the D’Hondt formula. As parties start to win regional seats their tally is in turn reduced using the formula. This continues for seven rounds until all the seats are won.

As I said at the start there is no political analysis in this post. I was simply trying to explain how the AMS works in Scottish parliamentary elections. That isn’t to say that having an understanding of the system’s mechanics doesn’t lend itself it to some conclusions, but these will be in another post.

When all three posts are online I’ll put a Google Sheet which might make it easier to see what’s happening. I’ve tried to make it as easy to follow as possible.

This is the first of three posts looking at the second vote and its potential effect.

The title of my talk today is ‘Digital: A double-edged sword’. I’m grateful to the Working Group for the Assemblies for Democracy Scotland for providing the opportunity to give this talk and to Penny Cole for suggesting the talk’s title, which some of you will no doubt recognise as a Gramscian conception of literacy. Gramsci considered literacy to be a double-edged sword in that it can be used for the purpose of social empowerment and for the reproduction of repression and domination. And that raises the question about how we, as democrats, handle this sword in a digital age, and particularly with regard to the governmental release of data in digital form. The talk is in two parts but it would be simplistic to think that the double-edge of the sword is some sort of binary between good bits of…

Last month, before the General Election, I wrote a post about the language used to describe zero-hour contracts. Much of the focus was concentrated at the time, and still is if these tweets are anything to go by, on what was/is meant by ‘exploitative’

However my partner’s experience of working for the Labour-SNP coalition of East Renfrewshire Council taught me that the real sleight of hand was in the definition of ‘zero-hour contract’. Just to recap on this; ERC claim not to use zero-hour contracts but instead have a number of bank or casual staff who may, or may not, have work from week-to-week but who are not guaranteed a minimum number of hours. The link to the earlier post is here. What I didn’t know were how many people this involved.To find this out I made a Freedom Of Information request to East Ren Council which asked them to specify, by department and by gender, the total number of individuals the Council employs as ‘bank/casual’ staff. That seemed, to me, to be the lowest common denominator of what constitutes a zero-hour contract.

The figures that they sent to me are:

So that’s just under one thousand employees of the Labour-SNP controlled coalition on East Renfrewshire Council who don’t have a guaranteed number of working hours from week-to-week. I was also informed that ‘there is no mutual obligation in the contract and there is no exclusivity clause’.

There may need to be some further clarification on these numbers. The large ‘Education’ figure probably includes a fair number of supply teachers which in turn will undoubtedly include a number of retired teachers and lecturers who happily do the odd class now and again. I’m annoyed at myself for not having thought of that at the start. So that headline figure of 944 is probably inaccurate, and the real number will be lower, and possibly much lower. Some other points to note:

brings together services for children, families, adults and older people and is committed to improving the health of people living and working in East Renfrewshire and to making a difference to health inequalities.

covers a wide range of functions, including frontline services, for example cleansing and parks; regulatory and advisory services and strategic responsibilities, such as transport, planning, housing and sustainable development.

As I was writing this post, this image was doing the rounds on social media.

It’s meant as a testament to the seriousness with which the SNP view zero-hour contracts, and is a visual representation of the SNP’s recent election manifesto commitment (p.10).

We will also support tough action to end exploitative zero hours contracts.

And yet, in power with Labour in East Renfrewshire, the SNP have a considerable number of people going from week without knowing how many hours, if any, they will be working. These are zero-hour contracts. Let us call things by their proper names. It makes everything simpler. But that doesn’t analyse the hypocrisy; it simply states what to many was already apparent.

Despite protestations to the contrary, the SNP are a bourgeois nationalist party, and the interests of the Scottish working class cannot be served by them. Despite their rhetorical tacking to the left of Labour their practices in power remain welded to capitalist solutions within an overall neoliberal framework: to borrow Slavoj Žižek’s well-known dictum from Welcome to the Desert of the Real, today’s market provides us with a range of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol, and in case of the SNP, social justice without class politics.

The time has come for the Scottish left to get organized, disciplined, and malignant.

Last week we received a Labour Party flyer in which Jim Murphy pledges to ban exploitative zero hour contracts. That was somewhat surprising because my partner had previously worked on a zero hour contract for East Renfrewshire Council (a Council led by a Labour-SNP coalition). What puzzled me was why, if zero hour contracts are exploitative, are they used by the local authority in Jim Murphy’s parliamentary constituency and put into practice by councillors of whom Jim Murphy is nominally the leader. I couldn’t get my head round it.

But rather than immediately bothering Jim, who seems to have enough troubles of his own making, I thought I’d check this out with a local East Ren councillor. Before telling you what he said let me give you a brief idea of what working on the contract was like for my partner

She didn’t know from week to week if she was working and so she didn’t know if she was going to be earning any money. She didn’t know from week to week how many hours she’d be working although she knew she couldn’t exceed 35 hours because that was the contract’s ceiling. She didn’t know from week to week where she’d be working or which hours she’d be working. It was impossible to plan around because when you get that phone call you drop everything and take the shift otherwise they might not call again.

Now if you’re wondering why she signed up to this contract it’s because zero is better than nothing. There’s always the hope that you’ll get some hours and in truth for most weeks she did. One curious feature which we didn’t understand at the time was the way that even if she were covering a vacancy in a specific place she would share this with a number of other ‘casuals’. For some unknown reason she was never in a fixed place covering a vacancy.

Imagine then my discombobulation when the councillor told me that the Council have never used a zero hour contract!!! Instead, I was informed, the Council had a number of ‘bank’ staff that could be called upon when needed. These bank staff weren’t on zero hour contracts, it was explained, because ‘bank’ contracts don’t promise any hours. Whereas a zero hour contract offers a number of hours but which can be reduced to zero, a bank contract, according to the councillor, isn’t a zero hour contract because it offers zero hours in the first place.

I left the hub with an expression on my face which might well have come straight out a Greg Moodie cartoon. This definition of a bank contract sounded an awfy lot to me like a zero hour contract and I suspected a lot of people would be surprised to learn that a contract that offers zero hours isn’t a zero hour contract. My understanding of what that term means also seems to accord with what the BBC Business unit think it means

Q: What are zero-hours contracts?

A: Zero-hours contracts, or casual contracts, allow employers to hire staff with no guarantee of work

Over the weekend I put together an email and sent it off to Jim Murphy. I’m awaiting his reply.

As I put the email together I had one of those eureka moments when I realised that the meaning of the pledge wasn’t in its content but in its grammar. All those long Open University nights reading Halliday were finally going to pay off. What I realised was that ‘exploitative’ wasn’t being used simply as a pejorative to describe all zero hour contracts, but was instead being used as a qualifying adjective to describe some zero hour contracts. Rather than categorise or classify all zero hour contracts as exploitative the grammar was being used to say that some zero hour contracts are more exploitative than others.

I’m not saying Jim Murphy’s lying in his pledge. Given the opportunity he may well be in a position to ban exploitative zero hour contracts. He just won’t be banning zero hour contracts.

And of course, once ‘exploitative ‘ zero hour contracts are banned all that will happen is that employees will be transferred over to ‘bank’ contracts with the guaranteed promise of … yeah you’ve guessed it … zero hours.

On Wednesday evening, along with some of the workers from Bonnyton House, I took part in a protest outside East Renfrewshire Council’s headquarters. Bonnyton House is a council owned care home which is at risk of privatisation from the Labour-SNP coalition that runs the Council.

Later that night I wrote a letter to The National newspaper. The first and foremost of the letter intentions was to publicise the Save Bonnyton campaign. It was good that the letter was published and that that was achieved.

What I hadn’t noticed until late Friday night was that the letter had been edited to remove the fact that the protest was supported by local members of Common Weal, Women for Independence and the Radical Independence Campaign. In the letter, I had wanted to draw attention to the irony between the current rhetoric of a Westminster ‘progressive alliance’ and the actions of East Renfrewshire Council’s Labour and SNP coalition. There’s no point of locking the Tories out of power if they are simply replaced by different shades of neoliberalist, Thatcherite policy makers. A progressive alliance shouldn’t be about locking the Tories out of power but of locking neoliberalist ideology out of power: blue Tory, red Tory or tartan Tory they’re still fuckin’ Tories. We oppose all of them all.

The letter’s irony, that we are the progressive alliance, was lost in that edit unfortunately.

So what did I learn this week from the protestors, and from then reading Shafi and Ali?

It’s long been evident that Labour can’t be trusted to oppose neoliberalism (you don’t need to have read Ali’s book to know that) but if anyone was in any doubt about the SNP, the evidence from the Bonnyton House campaign is that neither can they. A coalition that proposes to privatise a publicly-owned care home cannot be called progressive. An opposition that does not oppose the neoliberalist, Thatcherite ideology of the establishment is not an opposition. It’s nothing more than a variation.

The independence referendum result was hardly in, and David Cameron’s first reaction was to link greater powers for the Scottish Parliament to a solution to the West Lothian question or English votes for English laws (EVEL) as it seems to be now phrased as. He did it again last week following the launch of the Smith Commission.

But what exactly are these English laws that Scottish MPs shouldn’t be allowed to vote on?

It was a good question, and one that I put to my local MSP. It was passed onto a researcher in the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe) and from there onto a researcher in the House of Commons Library. The House of Commons Library have been asked a lot about this , and fortunately they’ve produced the following paper on the “English Question”:

This paper finds four bills in this UK Parliament (ie since May 2010) that might be seen as “England-only” in terms of their legislative reach. These are:

The Academies Act 2010 whichextends only to England and Wales, and creates arrangements only in England;

The Water Industry (Financial Assistance) Act 2012 whichextends only to England and Wales, and creates arrangements only in England;

The Local Government Act 2010 whichextends only to England and Wales. Its effect was in England, and in practice it was restricted to certain areas of England only since it stopped the proposed restructuring of councils in Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk; and

The Mobile Homes Act 2013 whichwas a Private Members’ Bill which became an Act. It extends only to England and Wales, and in Wales it made no changes to the law. Its substantive provisions are all couched in terms of “In England such-and-such shall happen”.

and that’s all folks; four in four years.

However, even these four are not completely clear cut and potentially open to debate. For example, in relation to the Academies Act 2010, an MP in a constituency near the border might argue that their own school leavers are impacted by the academy school leaves who are competing in the same local job market (Carlisle and Dumfries springs to mind)

Also, two of the four Bills listed above create the potential for Government costs, which could impact on the size of the Scottish block grant coming through the Barnett formula.

The Water Act describes financial assistance that the Secretary of State may give to an English water or sewerage company in order to reduce charges to customers. It is an amendment of Part 5 of the Water Industry Act 1991, which envisages financial assistance, so it appears to be a modification of an existing regime. The assistance can be in any form, but in particular can be a grant, a loan or a guarantee.

The Academies Act allows the Secretary of State to enter into academy arrangements with whoever is going to run the school. Under s1(2) – (4) this may be by an agreement or by financial assistance. I think this distinction is technical: they each relate to money being given to a school that complies with the terms set out in the Act. Money under an agreement is per this Act, money as financial assistance is per the Education Act 2002. In respect of capital funding, there can also be provision for the money to be paid back, so it becomes effectively a loan. But either way, it comes from the UK Government spending.

Now given that education and water are both devolved to the Scottish Government, these two Acts at least have the potential to have implications for the size of the Scottish block in the future.

So, see when I said four it wisnae really four; it’s actually only two clear cut English laws in this parliament.

And so there it is. Future devolution to the Scottish Parliament could be placed on hold until Westminster works out a way to stop Scottish MPs voting on restructuring Councils in southern England (don’t remember that cropping up during the indyref but mibby I wasn’t paying enough attention). And of course who will ever forgot that critical speech by Gordon Brown in the final days of the referendum on that issue that lies at the heart of the matter: how often caravan parks in England are inspected.

References & Credits

Thanks to Colin and Ross for providing this information

The opening paragraph is almost poached from ‘Editorial’, The National, Monday December 1, 2014, p.24

This was the first MOOC that I’ve done with Google and my third MOOC in total. The first, Gamification (with Coursera) was a combination of video and activities with the opportunity of interaction for social learning on the fora. Much the same as this Google MOOC really. They share the sort of pedagogy that easily gets disparaged, but it suited me for a number of reasons, not least of all its asynchronicity. I appreciate that synchronous MOOCs have the capacity for a more interesting social pedagogy, but to commit to being in the same place for five Tuesdays in a row? Sorry, but I simply can’t manage that. The Open Badges MOOC that I dropped out of had an important synchronous element, and having missed two live sessions I just gave up.

Why am I doing this MOOC?

Before starting the MOOC I read a new blog post by Anne Dhir about the launch of Open Glasgow’s data literacy project.

Citizens need to be able to articulate their needs and be part of the solution.

which, by coincidence (or not) is a subject that I happened to briefly question Sally Kerr from Edinburgh City Council about when we were at OpenDataEDB #11. If the Wikipedia page is anything to go by ‘Data literacy‘ is a new literacy with not a lot written about it.

It was interesting to also compare the creation date and size of related literacy articles on Wikipedia

and to also see that ‘data literacy’ isn’t featured in the encyclopaedia’s ‘New literacies‘ article. I had a brief look at what Doug Belshaw is doing with Mozilla’s Web Literacy Map and I need to look at that in more detail because there’s definitely a basis there for constructing a unique Data Literacy Map, if one doesn’t already exist somewhere.

One thing that appears missing from the web literacy map (or at least wasn’t staring me in the face) but which needs to be a feature of data literacy is the critical understanding of data. In a personal email Greg Singh from the University of Stirling captures this perfectly,

For me, data literacy would be a very deep-level understanding of data (how it is produced,… read, … understood and interpreted; how it can be transformed and shared). [T]hat would involve a skillset that would take in coding, a good understanding of networks, machine-readable formats etc., but also, crucially, critical understanding of the role of data and its use…In both cases (data literacy and digital literacy) the emphasis I think is on a critical understanding of the WHY as well as the HOW.

Although the Google MOOC addresses some of the hands-on, ‘how’, skills it’s pedagogic goal wasn’t to altruistically raise the standard of data literacy. Wilkowski et al (2014) in their research paper explain that

Google, Inc. has been experimenting with MOOCs to teach members of the public how to use Google tools more efficiently and effectively. (p.1)

and thus the MOOC’s aim was to develop the skill-set to manage a particular Google product which in this instance was Fusion Tables. This is MOOC as marketing device.

Is that unfair? Does it matter if Google provide some free training that lasts only a couple of weeks, and and that my overall data literacy has improved? Well, yes, I can imagine that it probably does. However, it’s not possible to do this type of work without also learning how to use somebody’s product. At any rate, for the present I’m happy with the trade-off. A basic guide to Google FTs is here. The product is in beta at present, and word is that it’ll remain an ‘experimental product’.

Why Google and not School of Data?

It would be an incredible project legacy if Open Glasgow could develop and improve data literacy across the city. It’s certainly featured in their Principles of Open Data. But with these thoughts about other people’s level of data literacy I thought I’d better get mine off home base first.

Why though has it taken this Google MOOC to get me started?

The School of Data introductory course is always open, always accessible, always available, there’s no start date – it’s just there. And that, for some reason, is difficult for me to handle. When should I start? Now? Well, perhaps tomorrow. Maybe at the weekend.It’s almost too easy to put off. It’s a bit like the gym membership that I bought in a moment of fitful, well-intentioned energy and which has fallen outside of the tunnel. So, oddly it seems that it’s not that the start date of the Google MOOC particularly suits me but that because there is an end date, and that if I really want to do this course I need to put the effort in, now.

My intention was to take the opportunity of the scarcity in order to focus on completing before the deadline of the course end date. Making Sense of Data was a short course that was scheduled to last a little under three weeks and was estimated to take somewhere between 10-15 hours of study to complete. In my, admittedly limited, experience of what MOOC providers estimate in terms of time I reckoned that this would probably be an underestimation. Graham Atwell’s blog post ‘Some thoughts about MOOCs‘ suggests that my experience of time under-estimation is not uncommon, and that it may be a contributory factor in the format’s high drop-out rate. We’ll wait and see.

In the end, things didn’t go quite to plan. I was unwell for the period of the MOOC, and the scarcity that I thought would help me concentrate began to work against me. In the words of Mullainathan and Shafir the scarcity magnified itself and having fallen into a scarcity trap I had to really tunnel my way out. Anyway, in the end I managed to successfully complete the thing.

And I enjoyed it too, even though the illness meant that I didn’t really engage with it or the subject in quite the way I’d planned or wanted to. Nice to have passed though. And having thought about time and scarcity and literacy levels I’ve finally managed to get started in School of Data.

1. I get ‘open’, I really do…but why should I share anything when the enemy down the road gives fuck all?

2. I would, but that would mean asking other members of staff for their packs,… and they wouldn’t like that

At the end of November 2013 I unfortunately missed the rearranged JISC RSC Scotland Open Education event held at Edinburgh University. Although it’s taken a bit of time to get this post online I was thankfully able to keep up with the discussion using the RSC’s YouTube Channel.

Open Scotland got the proceedings underway with a presentation that was shared between Lorna Campbell and Joe Wilson. Lorna began by providing some background to the work of Open Scotland and it’s clear to see that there’s a lot of encouraging activity in Scotland with the Open Knowledge Foundation, OBSEG and Scotland’s first Wikimedian-in-Residence. However, it was also made clear that open educational practices continue to be less embedded in Scotland than they are in other places, including England.

The second part of the presentation was given by Joe Wilson from SQA. Now, just in case you’re beginning to wonder, neither of the two statements at the top of this post came from Lorna or Joe, and they didn’t come from hecklers in the room either. They are instead out of the mouths of two lecturers working in different campuses of the same Scottish FE college and were made in conversation with me during 2013.

Joe’s session was, in a way, a call to move away from politely nodding about the virtues of open practices to actually starting to do it. You don’t need to be a psychological genius to detect the frustration in Joe’s part of the presentation; and that frustration can be understood in the context of a recent JIME paper and blog post both written by Martin Weller. In these pieces Weller doesn’t argue that the battle for open is being lost, and that it desperately needs the Scottish educational establishment to provide a late cavalry charge to save the day: quite the contrary. Weller instead argues that the battle for open has already been victorious, and that the real battle is the one that will now determine the future narrative of open.

Now “if” the two quotations at the top of this post are in any way representative of what FE lecturers in Scotland actually think and feel about adopting open working practices then Joe’s frustration can hardly come as a surprise. But why should Joe be frustrated if the battle has already been won? Well the answer is that it’s been won elsewhere, and the battle to define open is being fought elsewhere. In other words, the opinion of the Scottish educational sector won’t be heard because we aren’t present on the battlefield. You simply can’t be in the vanguard if you’re not on the battlefield: you can’t even be in the fucking rearguard.

And yet, as depressing as the two quotations from the lecturers are, I don’t think they are cause for despair. Both lecturers appear to want to share but are somehow restricted by ‘the other’. This reminded me of Lenin’s analysis that whilst capitalism predisposes the workers to the acceptance of socialism it does not make them conscious Socialists. I’ve re-worked this such that whilst there may be a general acceptance of open in the Scottish FE community it doesn’t automatically lead to open practices.

So, what is to be done?

Well, it’s definitely about empowering individuals at the grassroots with the pedagogic and technical literacies. But it’s also about the conditions that makes the use of the literacies possible. There needs to be a policy context.

What I think is significant about the lecturers’ statements is the way that they both, independently, frame the resistance to sharing such that in both cases, it’s ‘the other’ that prevents them. Whilst for the first speaker ‘the other’ is the college down the road, the competitor, the ones on the outside of the institution, for the second speaker the ‘other’ isn’t even on the outside of the same office, let alone outside the institution. ‘The other’ is powerful and pervasive.

Although not disagreeing with Joe that there remains in the dark Calvinistical soul of the Scottish character a lingering fear of change, but I would argue that instead of thinking of the lecturers’ words as reflections of an inner state I think we need to see their language as something as much more discursive. Mills describes Foucauldian discourse as ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’, and so it isn’t about convincing these guys not to be scared or not be fearful but rather to put in place the practices that makes sharing, to borrow Lenin’s terminology, spontaneous.

Audrey Watters’ post Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2013: The Battle for “Open” is hugely significant because it reminds, or should remind, those involved on the side of open that the battle is not simply theoretical or moral, but political. In a 1982 University of Vermont lecture Political Technology and the Individual Michel Foucault identifies two not unproblematic forces at play in the modern state. The first is technological, in the sense of the practices through which the individual “man” either strengthens or weakens the state’s survival, and the second is the political, in the sense of the relationship between the state and it’s external ‘enemies’.

In his lecture, Foucault argues that

the practices of the state are embodied within its institutions

and the use of “the enemy” in the first lecturer’s quotation shows, not just how deeply the institutions had embodied that ideology of Thatcherite competition, but also how effectively that rivalrous structure has, in turn, been internalised by their staff members. The dismantling of the Thatcherite/Conservative structure of FE college management was always explicitly one of Michael Russell’s political drivers for college regionalisation in Scotland. However as much as regionalisation and reclassification are to be welcomed they won’t, by themselves, bring about the institutionalisation of open practices.

In a way, this is why the Future Cities: Open Glasgow project is so important. Although the project isn’t educationally driven or minded, it does seem to indicate that certain open practices are starting to slowly filter down from central to local government. And yet, even if every local authority in Scotland (and there are enough of them) were to follow Glasgow’s lead (which they eventually will) it will still be necessary for the technological interests of the individual to align with the political interests of the institution, and the state. In the words of the recent Norwegian Government’s report ‘these must be connected together and clearly have the same effect’, (in Campbell, 2013).

Open source is one of the greatest management innovations of the 21st century

This could be done by effectively re-licencing the educational resources produced by publicly-funded educational institutions. Copyright would no longer reside with the institution but would lie within the public domain. However, “if” the quotations at the top of this post are in any way representative of what FE lecturers in Scotland actually think then I’m not entirely sure that a change in licensing would quickly undo years of state-sponsored rivalry.

Maybe it could be more effectively driven in the way that Cable Green advocated in Washington State, such that public money would only be forthcoming if publicly-funded educational institutions adopted open practices that were genuinely beneficial to the public. So with the smallest rewordings of the Nordic OER Alliance’s ideas, Scottish FE institutions could continue to receive

funding, if they invest in improving the level of digital literacies of their staff which makes openness possible;

funding, if their staff make available top quality open educational resources;

funding, if they develop the infrastructure and pedagogy of online learning

funding, if the public derives benefit from their MOOCs

Only if an institution can demonstrate their openness should the institution be granted 100 pc of their funding allocation. By changing the funding nature of the political relationship between educational institutions and the state, this would, in turn, change the technological relationship of the individual to their institution. Whatever way it’s done, it needs done.

opensourceway, ‘Gary Hamel: Open source is one of the greatest management innovations of the 21st century’, Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/opensourceway/4371000486/, accessed 14 December 2013, (CC-BY-SA 2.0)